Bought the best Aqualisa iLux Digital shower available; but it takes a week to get a service engineer! [Updated]

A while ago my wife began talking about renovations. I nodded along. We bought our main place in the summer.

We’ve actually been living in it for a few years as we initially rented it — and, like the proverbial Victor Kiam catchphrase, we liked it so much, we bought it. Or, more accurately, we were able to buy it privately so it was a good opportunity.

The understanding was that once we completed, we’d set about fixing it up.

We set aside a good amount of cash.

I reminded my wife that she could do as she pleased in terms of decor. This is our operating model. I just specified one thing: I want the absolute best shower you can possibly buy.

When my wife mentioned that the plumber recommended a shower that came with it’s own remote control, I was sold.

I just said yes. That one.

Oh, I also specified, THE BIGGEST, too. I mean in terms of rainfall shower head.

So we’ve ended up with a massive 18” (I think) Aqualisa monstrosity. It’s brilliant. Utterly excellent. It comes with four programmable buttons along with the obligatory temperature and flow controls. The idea is that you get all the settings to your liking and then press-and-hold on one of the buttons (numbered 1-4). That then becomes your default setting. Hit number ‘1’ and boom, the shower activates to your precise specifications. In practice it needs maybe 5 seconds to get ready.

I love it.

The remote control takes things one step further. Yes. It’s exactly what you’re thinking. You can lie in bed, reach for the Aqualisa remote control and hit ‘1’. Boom. The shower turns on and sets itself to your requirements. And you’re STILL in bed. Come on!

I relished the opportunity of being able to hit ‘1’, and then lift myself out of bed and straight into the waiting heat.

I haven’t, however, managed to try out the remote control.

That’s because after three days of great showers, the unit just stopped working.

The plumber ‘looked at it’ and then declared he didn’t know what was wrong.

So my wife’s been on to Aqualisa. And they’re sending a guy out “next week”.

To be accurate, this was Wednesday (if memory serves) last week.

The support chappy is apparently due this Wednesday.

A seven day service level is rubbish.

Yes, this is a #firstworldproblem. Definitely.

But having blown the equivalent of a decent MacBook Pro, I am deeply unsatisfied.

To make matters worse (and, I’m looking at you, Aqualisa), I am reminded of this deep satisfaction every flipping morning when I SIT in the flipping bath and use the highly annoying shower-thing attached to the (new) bath.

To be fair, the pressure is excellent on the shower-thing.

I then shave in the double sink trying not to look at the dormant Aqualisa shower behind me.

I haven’t even had time to fill out the guarantee and I am already highly frustrated.

I suppose the annoyance is driven by the dearth of information about the failure. Nowadays I am accustomed to understanding what the problem is and how, possibly, I can fix it.

Is it unreasonable to expect a next day fix? Probably.

Two day? Potentially difficult.

But 7 flipping days?

Arse.

Anyway, I love the shower.

But I have zero tolerance for stuff not working. And I have limited amounts of patience for the fix.

When the engineer arrives, I’m hoping he (or she) will identify a decent problem. It’s seriously annoying there isn’t some visible readout showing an error message like “please could you put in a new battery”.

I seriously — SERIOUSLY — hope that we don’t get lumbered with one of those “Oh, I’ll need to order the part,” situations.

I’ll keep you updated.

[Update: Thanks to the Aqualisa team on Twitter who were exceptionally responsive. I think next time I’ll go to them first. The Aqualisa engineer actually arrived the day after this post and was done in about 5 minutes. Apparently he just tweaked something and boom, it’s been working perfectly for weeks now.]

2 Responses to Bought the best Aqualisa iLux Digital shower available; but it takes a week to get a service engineer! [Updated]

You may also want to try and arrange for the plumber to visit at the same time. That way they can’t keep passing the problem off on to one another. If the problem is right on the edge of where the shower system ends and the standard plumbing begins you may need both to fix it anyway. I have no experience of that brand of shower but the one we did have, of a similar type, developed a fault after 11 days and we failed to get both the engineer and the plumber together for another 3 weeks. Once we did the problem was sorted in 48 hours. Our shower engineer took three days to arrive the first time but we benefited from living in the same city that the shower company was based in.